Silos are Everywhere. I’ve worked a few different places. And in every place I’ve heard the buzzword phrase: “We are too siloed.” It isn’t limited to software development–it happens everywhere. Until recently I thought “silos” were negative. Perhaps you have too. In the context of software development, speaking of them tends to hold an antipathetic […]

With COVID-19 causing people to work from home, and now schools closing, I wanted to share some tips on making it work well. My wife and I homeschool our kids. And I have worked from home regularly for the past 3 years. This is more of a “brain dump” so please overlook the lack of […]

A note to young developers Okay, so databases didn’t teach me everything, but close enough. So much so I thought I would share my journey from fledgling developer to a data architect. What should I be? I’m getting older. No, I didn’t say old. I said “older.” As in maturing: Age-wise and experience-wise. Something that […]

I’ve been in the technology realm for over 15 years now. In every place I’ve worked, from brand new developer to architect, there is a common problem. The technology team tends to be very separated from the people who use what they create and support. There are support representatives who take calls, emails or chats […]

If you’ve read my previous two posts, you know I’ve had some issues with Azure Data Factory lately. But it hasn’t deterred me from using it. I still like the tool. One thing that has been difficult is the lack of good tutorials on using it (or maybe I just can’t find them). Microsoft has […]

I ran into another generic error today while trying to publish changes to an Azure Data Factory pipeline. One of the things that really irks me with this tool is that the error messages are famously unhelpful. They don’t tell you what the problem is directly. Instead, they redirect you to unhelpful, generic documentation. Here […]

Lately I’ve been using Azure Data Factory for a few data movement tasks. Like a good developer, I linked my factory to GitHub. I like to know I can recover from big mistakes somewhat easily. However, I ran into issues when something got out of whack. I’ll address two issues here: Azure Data Factory reporting […]

Stuff here could apply to other industries and professions. I work in technology, so that’s the spin. If you work in technology you have seen ugly things. Not many of us want to work on them. They’re the old relics of software teams past, where all product knowledge has disappeared. The projects you want to […]

When I’m learning a new language, there are a few basic things I like to do. Such as playing with arrays and iterators. A common practice for me is to filter or map items based based on whether they are even or odd. Today I decided to mix it up a bit and see if […]